Augmented Intelligence
For me AI = Augmented Intelligence. I am finding that this framing allows us to unlock the full potential and drive adoption.
Recently I had the incredible pleasure of meeting several of our senior clients on the topic of GenAI and AI along with my absolutely fantastic and fun colleague Dan Martines. I found the discussions elevating!
How to practically think of applying AI + GenAI in your company?
Imagine a role in your company and unpack it into its core components. For example the sales role could be unpacked into:
[a] possess detailed knowledge of the products / services
[b] think probabilistically about the product / service most likely to be relevant for the customer
[c] explain the value / benefit in a personalised way to the customer
[d] navigate rejection / decline tactically
[e] follow sales process — capture sales log in CRM, decide next steps etc…
Now imagine a coach / co-pilot / friendly helper in any or all of these components. To do this — just imagine each of these components happening 10x better. This is what AI + GenAI can do for the sales role. In some cases it might replace the human. But in most cases, it will augment the human.
Hence for me AI = Augmented Intelligence.
The exciting bit (for me at least).
My senior colleague Arindam Bhattacharya and i have been discussing for a while whether the ‘empathy’ layer in any business — customer interface can be replaced by AI + GenAI. I had this hypothesis that this was possible, because AI wont get tired and AI can be programmed to control tone and language. For the first time, Dan showed me data which showed that this was possible.
JAMA Internal Medicine released a report comparing responses of doctors and ChatGPT to patient’s queries on two dimensions
[a] accuracy
[b] empathy
…and i was stunned and elated to see that ChatGPT scored higher on both accuracy and empathy.
So What for CEOs / Founders / Investors / employee?
If empathy layer can be replaced or augmented using GenAI + AI, this opens up productivity and customer loyalty unlocks of a different order of magnitude. Imagine the implications for customer loyalty, stickiness, trust and customer satisfaction. Early data shows the lift could be 40%+ higher for middle performer. Means — you can shift the mean productivity of your teams.
Note — the data below is about productivity lift across a wide range of tasks across 750 research subjects.
To be sure, this study also found that there is a class of problems which are not suitable for GenAI. In fact, in tasks that require judgment, there can actually be a productivity loss. Making the case even stronger for Augmented Intelligence.
Of course, given how quickly this technology is evolving, these data points need to be revisited at a high frequency and may have short shelf life. But the direction of travel is clear — under the right guard rails and governance, Augmented Intelligence is here to stay.
PS: views are personal
